Violating copyright law, becoming a de facto publisher, being liable for copyright infrightment… The moment an ISP decides it can and should interfere with traffic it ceases to be a common carrier – a simple pipe. That is not only a bad idea from an end-user point of view, this is also definitely not in the ISP’s interest !

How long before the content alteration is not so obvious? Seems a logical next step for ISPs to block ads for competitors, remove criticism of themselves, etc. Or maybe along with some industry giant paying for faster connections than their startup competitor they also pay for certain features to be disabled on their competitor’s site? There is simply no upside to this approach when compared to sending users to a designated page when opening their browser like hotels and others do today. There is, however, the potential for a huge downside.

See my small cartoon:
http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/2007/12/your-personal-w.html

Bye,
Oliver

I’ve made this comment on a few other blogs, but I’ll make it here as well because it’s especially germane.

Network neutrality means not using one’s control of the pipe to disadvantage competitive content or service providers. For example, if you’re a cable company that offers VoIP, network neutrality means not blocking customers’ use of other VoIP providers.

Network neutrality does NOT mean that a provider can’t “frame” pages (as do many providers — especially those like Juno which provide inexpensive or free service) or send them informative messages via their browser.

Let’s step back and take a dispassionate look at what Rogers is really doing here. They need to get a message to a customer. Like any experienced ISP, they know that there’s a good chance that e-mail won’t be read in a timely way, if at all. (We, as an ISP, find that our customers constantly change their addresses — often after revealing them online and exposing them to spammers — without any notice, and often let the mailboxes that we give them fill up, unread, until they exceed their quotas and no more can be received.) The Windows Message Service once worked to send users messages, but only ran on Windows and is now routinely blocked because it’s become an avenue for pop-up spam. Snail mail? Expensive and slow… and the whole point of the Internet is to do things faster and more efficiently than that. Give users an special program to display messages from the ISP? Users have too many things running in the background, cluttering their computers, already — so no one could blame them if they didn’t install it. (Also, many users won’t install an application for fear of viruses, and alternative operating systems likely would not run the software.) Display a different page than the user requested? Perhaps, but that certainly comes much closer to “hijacking” than what Rogers is doing. Display a message in the user’s browser window (where we know he or she is looking) along with the Web page, and let the user “dismiss” it as soon as it’s noticed? Excellent idea. A wonderful, simple, unobtrusive, and (IMHO) elegant solution to the problem.

Now comes Lauren Weinstein — known for drawing attention to himself by sensationalizing tempests in a teapot — who has never run an ISP but seems to like to dictate what they do. Lauren claims that the sky will fall if ISPs use this nearly ideal way of communicating with their customers.

Contrary to the claims of Mr. Weinstein’s “network neutrality squad” (who have expanded the definition of “network neutrality” to mean “ISPs not doing anything which we, as unappointed regulators, do not approve”), this means of communication does not violate copyrights. Why? First of all, the message from the ISP appears entirely above, and separate from, the content of the page in the browser window. It’s not much different that displaying it in a different pane (which, by the way, the browser might also be able to do — but this is better because it’s less obtrusive and unlikely to fail for the lack of Javascript or distort the page below). The display can’t be considered a derivative work, because no human is adding his own creative expression to someone else’s creation. A machine — which can’t create copyrighted works or derivative ones — is simply putting a message above the page in the same browser window.

It isn’t defacement, because the original page appears exactly as it was intended — just farther down in the window. And it isn’t “hijacking,” because the user is still getting the page he or she requested.

What’s more, there’s no way that it can be said to be “non-neutral.” The proxy which inserts the message into the window doesn’t know or care what content lies below. The screen capture in Weinstein’s blog showed Google, but it just as easily could have been Yahoo!, or Myspace, or Slashdot. For the same reason, it can’t be said to be an invasion of privacy, because the software isn’t looking at the content of the page above which it is inserting the message.

In short, to complain that this practice is somehow injurious to the author of the original page is akin to an author complaining that his book has been injured by being displayed in a shop window along with another book by someone he didn’t like. (Sorry, sir, but the merchant is allowed to do that.)

Nor is what Rogers is doing a violation of an ISP’s “common carrier” obligations (even if they were considered to be common carriers, which under US law, at any rate, they are not). Common carriers have been injecting notices into communications streams since time immemorial (“Please deposit 50 cents for the next 3 minutes”). And television stations have been superimposing images on program content at least since the early 1960s, when (I’m dating myself here) Sandy Becker’s “Max the burglar” dashed across the screen during kids’ cartoon shows and the first caller to report his presence won a prize. (The game was called “Catch Max.”) And in the US, Federal law — in particular, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — protects ISPs from liability for content they retransmit whether or not they are considered to be common carriers.

There are sure to be some folks — perhaps people who are frustrated with their ISPs for other reasons — who will take this as an opportunity to lash out at ISPs. But most customers, I think, will recognize this as a good and sensible way for a company to contact its customers. Our small ISP is looking into it. In fact, because the issue is being raised, we’re adding authorization to do it to our Terms of Service, so that users will be put on notice that they might receive a message through their browsers one day. I suppose it’s possible that a customer might dislike this mode of communication and go elsewhere, but I suspect that most of them will appreciate it. In the meantime, let’s just say “no” to regulation of the Internet.

If all Rogers is doing is editing the HTML of whatever page you download when you run close to your bandwidth cap to become a frameset featuring their ‘you are low on bandwidth’ message, it’s a GOOD thing – I, as a customer, like to know when I’m about to do something that will incur extra costs. I am liable to drop providers that do something that costs me more money without warning me.

Does it involve technology with the potential to monitor and modify data being accessed? Yes. Using an Internet connection grants whoever controls the routers the physical ability to monitor what passes through them and change it if they wish. This can be used with or without the user’s consent. Burma and China do this to limit access to dissenting political views; Saudi Arabia and, I think, Australia do it to limit access to porn (China also officially disapproves of porn). The Roings ad-trojan does it to put its own ads into Google search results on infected machines; Kazaa modified packets to redirect all Amazon referer links so that they would receive the money instead of the original poster; the adblock plugin does it to let Mozilla users block advertisements they don’t wish to see. The US government requires schools and libraries receiving government funding to purchase censorship software to prevent children from being exposed to material found sexually objectionable – and the filtering software tends also to block websites that the manufacturers find politically or personally objectionable; and to the best of my knowledge the US government is still actively monitoring all traffic sent through AT&T facilities; Scientology does it to reduce their members’ exposure to political or religious dissent (Including one rather silly gaffe where the censorship software was configured to block ‘xxxx’, because the word they actually wanted to block was considered so dangerous that it could not be put in the censorware’s configuration files.). Netcafe proxies do it to make you log in first; some workplace and ISP proxies do it to reduce overall bandwidth costs; some malware and spam filters do it to disrupt worms and spam.

All of these uses are slightly intrusive. Some are appreciated by the users affected by them, others are not.

There is a fairly high danger that the product being used will be used for its intended purpose – while telling me when I’m about to use up my bandwidth is a good thing, telling me that you’d like to offer me a great deal on a variable-rate mortgage (so I can be foreclosed on just like everyone else they sold them to) is a BAD thing. Not quite as bad as hiding the existence of the Falun Gong from me or reading all my email, but bad. And bad enough that I would drop them – I hate ads.

(A technical aside: it’s not at all practical for a standard high-speed ISP connection to use a splash page a la what netcafes do – they keep track of physical network connection and disconnection. There aren’t very many users who keep the network cables unplugged and wireless cards off until they start surfacing, and often even that information is hidden from the ISP router by a customer-owned router/firewall/accesspoint.)

So – use this opportunity to tell Rogers that you won’t put up with ads being inserted, but make it clear that you can tell the difference between what they’re sending and an ad. And then go and direct all this outrage at the companies that decided that you didn’t NEED any privacy because big government feels safer when you don’t have any and the countries that want to keep their subjects from accessing criticism of their regimes.